1 Abstract Phenomenological Description of Landscapes, Trees

Abstract Phenomenological description of landscapes, trees and terraces, oral history and historical ecology find traces of industrialization, plant disease and forest fires in Central Italian forests. Plant form, landscape form, and forest structure can be described through drawings that give resolutely partial descriptions of more-than-human encounters. This kind of knowledge of the landscape is potentially unstable and remade by the details that it contains. By using multiple methods for attending to more-than-human landscapes, we can learn to notice multiple throughscapes, landscape patterns that overlap and lie through each other, but which are linked to different histories. Multiplying histories means that rather than being seen as a single era, the Anthropocene can be understood as having many beginnings and coexisting histories that give rise to multiple futures. Keywords: Italy, forests, Anthropocene, landscapes 1 Ghostly Forms and Forest Histories1 The pine and chestnut forests of the Monti Pisani, only five kilometers south of Lucca, in central Italy, feel very far from the tourist sights of the city center, and from the industrial sprawl of paper, furniture and shoe factories that spreads across the plain. As in many Mediterranean places, mountains and valleys are near each other, but they are in many ways different worlds (Braudel 1972). These are certainly not the landscapes that most people think of when I tell them I am working in northern Tuscany. The few human visitors are mushroom pickers, hunters, the occasional mountain biker, sometimes volunteer fire fighters, or road maintenance crews. Although these forests are often empty of people, they are empty in a particular way; evidence of former human use is omnipresent. This is a place where people, trees, and other nonhumans have been entangled for a very long time. Traces of these past relationships are visible in the forms of trees, of areas of forest, of banks, terrace walls and drainage systems. Through my practices of walking, looking, and wondering, I have been tracing the ghostly forms that have emerged from past encounters between people, plants, animals, and soils. From such practices of wondering, I learn to tell stories about landscape change, which, I argue, suggest a way of engaging with the politics of global environmental change. These anthropogenic forest histories inspire contemporary environmental politics. The material traces of firewood cutting, tree cultivation, pastoralism, and plant disease are temporal rhythms that inspire projects of tree care or biomass energy production. Each of these projects responds to a different sense of what these forests are, of where they might be going, and of how to act in the face of global environmental change. This multiplicity of pasts and futures can help 2 us make political sense of the Anthropocene, the contemporary era when almost all ecosystems around the world have been in some measure affected by human activities.2 Critics of climate change policy (Hulme 2012), and more recently of the concept of the Anthropocene (Moore 2015), have criticized depoliticized scientific accounts of global environmental change that focus on a single account of the world supposed to inspire political action to protect the environment. Rather than recounting a single history that produced a unified landscape, in what follows I describe overlapping and interwoven “throughscapes” that are linked to multiple histories. From these storylines a different account of Anthropocene politics can emerge. The first history I tell is of the impact of international trade, which moved pathogens around the world and destroyed chestnut cultivation in this area between the mid-19th-century and the 1950s. In this account, the storyline is linked to international trade, to the unintentional journeys of fungal spores and to the capacities of chestnut trees to develop new forms of symbiosis, which halted the advance of some pathogens. The second history starts in the early 1800s, and is one of capitalism and industrialization. Key actors in this account are the peasants3 and shepherds who were transformed into industrial and service workers. Changing forms of agriculture and the gradual transformation of urban metabolisms caused fire-dependent pine trees to spread across these mountains when litter raking, pastoralism, and anthropogenic burning were eliminated. In the present moment, farmers, foresters and others draw upon these histories of transformation and cultivation as they imagine how they might transform parts of the landscape in order to bring into being different environmental futures. These landscapes are simultaneously concrete and material, historical and imaginative. They are linked to multiple histories and rhythms that can help us escape from thinking of nature or history as singular (what John Law calls a “one-world world”: Law 2015, 126). Multiplying our understandings of 3 possible pasts and futures, and of who might be helped or hurt by these futures, makes the Anthropocene political. The example of the Monti Pisani shows how we can learn to notice multiple coexisting Anthropocenes through mundane practices of walking, of looking and wondering at strange ontologies,4 of archival research, oral history, and drawing. These practices are suitable not only for forests, but for thinking through material politics in other parts of the world, from urban parks to river deltas and sewage systems. Figure 1. Monti Pisani, Lucca in the Background. 4 Figure 2. Monti Pisani and Italy Location Map Landscape Facts, Histories, and Ontologies “Landscape” is a deeply ambiguous term with a rich history. For many scholars landscape was an ideological construct, a canonical standard of elite taste that might support capitalism or state control (Berger 1977; Cosgrove 1985). More recently, Kenneth Olwig has reclaimed a substantive understanding of landscape as “a place of human habitation and environmental interaction” with particular legal, cultural, and economic histories (Olwig 1996, 630). As Anna Tsing points out in The Mushroom at the End of the World, landscapes emerge through encounters between people and other beings, including soils, mushrooms and disease organisms (Tsing 2015). In what follows I describe the kinds of landscapes and histories that emerge from encounters between people, trees, soils and terraces in formerly cultivated landscapes in Central 5 Italy. Perhaps most importantly, this kind of landscape description pushes us to think about how particular forms emerge through encounters, where ontologies are transformed through partial relations between these beings, and where the forms of plants and terraces are clues to the biographies of particular organisms. At a larger scale, landforms such as terraces and drainage systems tell us histories of human labor and attention to plants, soils and weather. Encounters both with individual organisms and with landscapes press us to explore or rediscover research methods of drawing and natural history. These methods are well suited both to the open ended nature of these encounters and to tracing the forms that result from encounters between people and non-humans (people, sheep, trees), and between non-humans and other non-humans (trees, soils, disease, fire). Such an ethnography of the landscape requires an attention to temporal rhythms of processes as different as rapidly moving fires and slow-growing trees, soil formation, daily cycles of weather and the structural violence of politico-economic transformation and state- formation. Knowledge of the landscape, with its attention to multiplicity and scalar instability, is a behaves differently from the kinds of knowledge explored by much anthropology of science and STS. Within STS, canonical work has been concerned with how particular facts are stabilized and come to be accepted, such as the scallops described by Michel Callon (Callon 1986) or the pasteurization practices described by Bruno Latour (Latour 1988). Such approaches emerge from studies of laboratory practice and they often describe how a single fact or version of the world is either accepted or rejected in particular locations and before particular audiences. More recent work has pointed to multiple enactments that emerge through practices that link multiple sites (Mol 2002). Knowledge of landscapes is closer to this way of thinking. In particular, 6 thinking with enactments suggests a kind of surprise, the indeterminacy and slipperiness of what is enacted (Lien and Law 2012). The slipperiness and indeterminacy of what arises from particular encounters with trees and terraces is part of what produces the multiple coexisting and somewhat unstable histories and knowledges of landscape that I describe in this paper. Knowledge of landscapes contains indeterminacy, texture and a possibility of scale change that is quite alien to the kinds of facts that STS and anthropology have been most concerned with. Such knowledge contains indeterminacy and fields of unresolved texture, smaller details that can become significant and change our understanding of what we take to be larger scales (or vice versa).5 This is not just a feature of the landscapes that we ordinarily think of. Come close to a tree, and you will see entire landscapes of relations at every scale, from the pattern of bark that tells you of an ancient tree, to the tiny red fungi that show a tree to be infested by chestnut cancer (farmers notice these spores with fear), or the dry crackled callous that shows that

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